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These days Pali isn’t often spoken. But it is chanted quite a bit. I imagine most readers haven’t heard what Pali sounds like, so here’s some Pali chanting for you to listen to. Below the video I’ve pasted the actual sutta so you can follow along (they chant it twice).

Karaniya Metta Sutta […]

Last chapter I talked about some of the interesting differences I found between the English and Japanese versions of Fight Club. This time I’m going to do more of the same. I mentioned before that watching Fight Club in Japanese was difficult for me because my listening comprehension skills are poor. That’s […]

It’s been a while since I wrote about my Pali study, but that doesn’t mean I’ve slowed down any. I’ve been pushing through the A.K. Warder book, entering all exercises into Mnemosyne and drilling them almost daily (I tend to miss a day on the weekend). I’ve just finished Lesson 7. Twenty-three […]

Asian Offbeat has an interesting article about some of the most difficult Chinese characters. These characters were found in a Qing dynasty dictionary. Here are a few of them:

Flying Squirrel

Exorcism

Thunder

Wow. That last one has 128 strokes.
You can read more about these and others at the original article here (found via a Japan […]

Rikker over at Language Scraps has made a great find: Multibabel. Just type in an english sentence and it will translate it back and forth between several languages and English until you end up with a machine-translated mess! Here’s my entry:
Original English Text:
I want to eat apple pie.
Translated to French:
Je veux […]

I announced in the inaugural Project Mayhem post that I would be studying Fight Club, in Japanese, in order to work on my embarrassingly insufficient Japanese listening skills. Japanese Fight Club is pretty difficult for my level. I’d estimate that 50% of the vocabulary that I ran into in the first 3 scenes […]

Recently Khatzumoto over at All Japanese All The Time wrote a great article comparing language learning to boiling water. Khatzumoto’s metaphor reminded me a lot of one used by my favorite Thai forest monk Ajahn Chah. He said:
Nothing happens immediately, so in the beginning we can’t see any results from our practice. This […]

The Japanese dictionary order is a, ka, sa, ta, na, ha, ma, ya, ra, wa, n.
I’ve been studying Japanese for a long time, but it wasn’t until recently that I learned the above dictionary order for the Japanese syllabary. The main reason for this is that I mostly use an electronic dictionary to look […]

It’s not everyday you see Pali mentioned in the news. I found this piece quite by accident:
More than a thousand monks and members of the public to recite Pali text 24-hours a day for 57 days
A marathon public reading of the Tripitaka, the earliest collection of Buddhist teachings, began yesterday at Sanam Luang, right […]

A few posts ago I mentioned that I had a new project to target my deficient Japanese listening comprehension skills. I stated that I was going to watch one of my favorite movies one scene at a time, over and over again, in dubbed Japanese. I ended the post with the first line […]